Earlier we shared our philosophy around some of the changes we are making in Midnight to better target Combat for Everyone.
We would like PvP to be more welcoming to new and returning players while retaining its current skill expression. Tackling this is a challenge we don’t take lightly because to learn PvP it requires learning how all the classes and specializations play which takes effort and patience. Beyond that, you have to track their own abilities, cooldowns, buffs, and debuffs as well as your teammates and enemies in real time in The War Within. This can become overwhelming, and we want players who are interested in PvP to have a welcoming first experience both in terms of gameplay and minimum knowledge for competency.
Some of the fun and depth of WoW’s PvP experience comes from skill expression in playing your class against others in a high pressure environment. Combat mastery continues to be a key skill to PvP success, and navigating your class against others in competition leads your team to victory.
We understand addons have become a vital tool in PvP over the years. A frequent experience of players that want to dive deeper into the higher tiers of our rated game modes, is that they are instructed by their peers to set up a multitude of addons to show important information to increase their odds of victory. We want to add some emphasis on existing UI elements and create new ones, which you will be seeing through alpha that will allow you to track important information in PvP, such as debuffs on nameplates (example shown below) and tracking diminishing returns (this will come in a future update).
We’re eager to hear your thoughts on these updates we’re making in Midnight and we’ll be sharing more information about PvP content in Midnight as alpha progresses.
I’ve been testing your nameplates in arenas, and personally I feel that they are not quite good enough currently, especially as a melee player. I don’t think I’m the only one that rarely looks at the enemy player frame - only the nameplates, and the information in regards to them using defensive/offensive cooldowns is non-existent. I think you should considering adding something similar to BigDebuffs to the base UI as an option, even if the addon restrictions required for this addon is removed. This will give everyone a more clear visual on what’s actually going on in a PvP fight.
DR’s should be visible in any PvP situation: Arenas, BGs and World PvP.
Blizzard current nameplate Buff/Debuff tracker is horrible. We should be able to customize it and add/remove buff/debuffs we want to track not what you (Blizzard) think we should.
Blizzard should consider to change dampening to either only Affekt healers , so dps specs that relay on selfheal as def dont get wrecked Compared to Other dps- or change it from % less healing to % increase mana cost.
Target Frame Debuff Tracking Need improvement with big debuffs aswell
I have been playing the beta and I am a bit worried about the combat changes in regards to PVP. I Realize that we are still too early within the beta cycle - However, ignoring pure numbers and tuning, there are some points I would like to bring up:
Melee uptime:
Melee did not lose significant mobility relative to the caster utility pruning. As an example, it was very common as a mage to use blast wave immediately as the first warrior charge connected. Followed by Alter Time and weaving blinks as necessary in between. This is no longer possible and the only way this would be viable for the mage, would be to lower the warriors throughput damage.
DR:
Right now, it is not possible to track DR for @player. This makes it impossible to know when to play aggressive.
Very difficult to test on the beta when there is no level 90 templates.
As is, I am very concerned about the damage profiles and the lack of options that healers have and without proper balancing will be an absolute fiesta.
